All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Today, I'll be touring the Toyota truck plant in San Antonio again, the plant known as TMMTX. I'm there with our "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group, all 40 of us. In this post, I share some pre-tour goals and share some links to previous Toyota plant visits (in Texas and Japan).
In the third and final part of this series, I share more about how Toyota teaches about TPS and TQM... and how they are sharing that approach with doctors and hospitals.
I'm excited that our sold-out "Symposium on Learning Organizations" group will be visiting Toyota's San Antonio plant on Wednesday. Later that day, we'll be touring the Garrison Brothers Distillery and, on Thursday, we are using their "barrel barn" as a venue for "Open Space" discussions, the Red Bead Experiment, and more. We have a group of 40 from many industries attending and we might run a similar event in a different location in the future.
I've blogged about Garrison Brothers and my stint as a bottling line volunteer before...
In that post, I shared pictures of me working to dip bottles of bourbon into a sealing wax. I was wearing a winter coat because it was February in Texas and there was a bit of snow and ice that week.
When I was back there recently, I saw some additional improvements that seem like "Kaizen" to me.
Today, I'll be appearing live as a guest on the live internet show "Quality Digest Live." You can watch live at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT on Friday...
QualityDigest.com also recently published a review of my book Measures of Success and we'll be discussing the book and more on the show.
I also recently discovered this short podcast episode / review about my book, from the "Improve Something Today" podcast by Brian Kerr...
Thanks to my friend Katie Anderson for writing a blog post about my latest book Measures of Success.
Visit the post and you'll see a link that goes to a book giveaway contest, where I am giving away (with Katie's help, of course), three copies of the eBook (the paperback book is coming later this year).
Today's post is the transcript of a discussion that I recently recorded with Jeff Hunter, the author of the book Patient-Centered Strategy: A Learning System for Better Care.
Jeff is presenting a free webinar that KaiNexus and I are hosting on September 24:
Putting Strategy Back in Strategy Deployment
Below, you can listen to our chat where Jeff introduces himself and some of the concepts that he'll be presenting about. The transcript follows the audio player.
You might remember my blog post from May about the Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese player for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (that's not a very "lean" team name, is it").
I suggested that Norman Bodek contact baseball or sports writers at publications like ESPN or The Wall Street Journal. The Journal wrote about Ohtani and Harada last week:
How Shohei Ohtani Visualized His Baseball Success
The Japanese two-way sensation turned to a personal-growth technique called the Harada Method to help him achieve his goals
Joining me from Sweden for Episode 318 of the podcast is Marcus Hammarberg, author of the fascinating book Salvation: The Bungsu Story: How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company.
Marcus is a software developer, consultant, lean/agile coach, speaker, and author. He ended up with an opportunity to work with a hospital in Indonesia and he tells that compelling story in the book. How did a huge hole in the roof help trigger a change in culture and results? You'll hear about that and more in this episode. I hope you enjoy it and find it inspirational, as I did.
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient The legendary quality leader W. Edwards Deming is widely known for his thoughts on statistics and systems. However, Deming believed that psychology was of crucial importance when improving organizational performance. The Institute for Improvement in Healthcare shares…
When an organization is barely into their "Lean journey" (or whatever they might call it), one challenge is that the leaders (or HR) don't really know what they want or need in candidates for positions in process improvement, operational excellence, or whatever they call it. I've made two posts on LinkedIn recently about two job posts that had me scratching my head.
Last week, I wrote about the influence of Total Quality Management (TQM) on Toyota -- in the past and the present, in Japan and beyond. Today, to follow up on that, I'm going to share some excerpts from some material that was shared by a Toyota leader who presented at a hospital I visited earlier this year as part of the Kaizen Institute-organized Japan trip.
If you're not a baseball fan, I apologize for a second baseball-themed post this week. Baseball has a lot of historical time-series data to work with and analyze. If you're not interested in "Process Behavior Charts" or similar methods, I guess I will apologize for this post again too. Next, I'll be apologizing for apologizing.
But, I am at Dr. Wheeler's four-day workshop on "Understanding Statistical Process Control" as I blogged about on Monday.
It's great to learn from Dr. Wheeler in person and I'll be sharing reflections on the class in a later post (and I'm posting a few things on LinkedIn along the way).
In Chapter 1 of Understanding Variation, Dr. Wheeler points out how charts or graphs are far superior to tables or lists of numbers. He uses a baseball example:
